databind

Python versions

The databind package provides a (de)serialization framework that understands most native Python types as well as dataclasses, as well as an implementation for serialize to/from JSON-like nested data structures.

Databind is intended mostly for flexible and easy to use configuration loading. It does not try achieve high-performance; you should look towards e.g. mashumaro for this usecase.

Example

@dataclass
class Server:
    host: str
    port: int

@dataclass
class Config:
    server: Server

from databind.json import dump, load

dict_payload = {"server": {"host": "localhost", "port": 8080}}
loaded = Config(server=Server(host="localhost", port=8080))

assert load(dict_payload, Config) == loaded
assert dump(loaded, Config) == dict_payload

Features ✨

Support for a plethora of builtin types, including Enum, Decimal, UUID, Path, datetime, date, time, timedelta
Support for multiple union serialization modes (nested, flat, keyed, typing.Literal)
Support for generic types, e.g. load([{"name": "Jane Doe"}], list[Person])
Support for new-style type hints in older Python versions when using forward refererences (strings or __future__.annotations) thanks to typeapi
- PEP 604 - Allow writing union types as X | Y
- PEP585 - Type Hinting Generics in Standard Collections)
Support for customized serialization and deserialization of types
Support for flattening fields of a nested dataclass or collecting remaining fields in a dict
Full runtime type checking during serialization
Use "settings" to customize serialization behaviour
- As global settings per load()/dump() call: load(..., settings=[ExtraKeys(True)])
- As class-level settings using a decorator: @Union(style=Union.FLAT) or @ExtraKeys(True)
- As type-hint level settings using typing.Annotated (or typing_extensions.Annotated): full_name: Annotated[str, Alias("fullName")] or FullNameField = Annotated[str, Alias("fullName")]

Notable release notes

4.5.0

Merged databind.core and databind.json packages into databind. The old PyPI packages will remain as proxies until the next minor version.
Dropped support for Python 3.6 and 3.7.